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Found: Pieces of meteorite spotted before impact

IT’S been an extraordinary trip for space rock 2008 TC3. First spotted on 6 October hurtling through space towards Earth, it exploded over Sudan the next day. Now tiny pieces of it have been found. The discovery means that, for the first time, we have detected a space rock ahead of a collision with Earth, watched it streak through the atmosphere and then recovered pieces of it.

According to Lindley Johnson of NASA, who reported the find on 16 February at a United Nations meeting in Vienna, the rocks were found in the Sudanese desert by a team from the …